It made sense for Anna to not like Michael, because of his personal conduct, or because he didn't like EA. (Expecting all of my friends to be friends with _each other_ would be [Geek Social Fallacy #4](http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html).) If she didn't want to invite him to CfAR stuff, fine; that's her business not to invite him. But what did she gain from _escalating_ to publicly denouncing him as someone whose "lies/manipulations can sometimes disrupt [people's] thinking for long and costly periods of time"?!
+-----
+Anyway, I wasn't the only one whose life was being disrupted by political drama in early 2019. On 22 February, Scott Alexander [posted that the /r/slatestarcodex Culture War Thread was being moved](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/) to a new non–_Slate Star Codex_–branded subreddit in the hopes that it would hope help curb some of the harrassment he had been receiving. According to poll data and Alexander's personal impressions, the Culture War Thread featured a variety of ideologically diverse voices, but had nevertheless acquired a reputation as being a hive of right-wing scum and villainy.
-[TODO SECTION: RIP Culture War thread, and defense against alt-right categorization
-
-I wasn't the only one whose life was being disrupted by political drama in early 2019. On 22 February, Scott Alexander [posted that the /r/slatestarcodex Culture War Thread was being moved](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/) to a new non–_Slate Star Codex_–branded subreddit in the hopes that it would hope help curb some of the harrassment he had been receiving. The problem with hosting an open discussion, Alexander explained, wasn't the difficulty of moderating obvious spam or advocacy of violence.
+[Yudkowsky Tweeted](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1099134795131478017):
> Your annual reminder that Slate Star Codex is not and never was alt-right, every real stat shows as much, and the primary promoters of this lie are sociopaths who get off on torturing incredibly nice targets like Scott A.
- * Suppose the one were to reply: "Using language in a way you dislike, openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning, is not lying. The proposition you claim false (Scott Alexander's explicit advocacy of a white ethnostate?) is not what the speech is meant to convey—and this is known to everyone involved, it is not a secret. You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning. Now, maybe as a matter of policy, you want to make a case for language like 'alt-right' being used a certain way. Well, that's a separate debate then. But you're not making a stand for Truth in doing so, and your opponents aren't tricking anyone or trying to."
- * What direct falsehood is being asserted by Scott's detractors? I don't think anyone is claiming that, say, Scott identifies as alt-right (not even privately), any more than anyone is claiming that trans women have two X chromosomes. Sneer Club has been pretty explicit in their criticism
- * examples:
- * https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/atgejh/rssc_holds_a_funeral_for_the_defunct_culture_war/eh0xlgx/
- * https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/atgejh/rssc_holds_a_funeral_for_the_defunct_culture_war/eh3jrth/
- * that the Culture War thread harbors racists (&c.) and possibly that Scott himself is a secret racist, with respect to a definition of racism that includes the belief that there are genetically-mediated population differences in the distribution of socially-relevant traits and that this probably has decision-relevant consequences should be discussable somewhere.
+I found Yudkowsky's use of the word "lie" here interesting given his earlier eagerness to police the use of the word "lie" by gender-identity skeptics. With the support of my posse, wrote to him again, a third time (Subject: "on defending against 'alt-right' categorization").
-And this is just correct: e.g., "The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project" favorably cites Cochran et al.'s genetic theory of Ashkenazi achievement as "really compelling." Scott is almost certainly "guilty" of the category-membership that the speech against him is meant to convey—it's just that Sneer Club got to choose the category. The correct response to the existence of a machine-learning classifer that returns positive on both Scott Alexander and Richard Spencer is not that the classifier is "lying" (what would that even mean?), but that the classifier is not very useful for understanding Scott Alexander's effects on the world.
+Imagine if someone were to reply: "Using language in a way _you_ dislike, openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning, is not lying. The proposition you claim false (explicit advocacy of a white ethnostate?) is not what the speech is meant to convey—and this is known to everyone involved, it is not a secret. You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning. Now, maybe as a matter of policy, you want to make a case for language like 'alt-right' being used a certain way. Well, that's a separate debate then. But you're not making a stand for Truth in doing so, and your opponents aren't tricking anyone or trying to."
-Of course, Scott is great and we should defend him from the bastards trying to ruin his reputation, and it's plausible that the most politically convenient way to do that is to pound the table and call them lying sociopaths rather than engaging with the substance of their claims, much as how someone being tried under an unjust law might dishonestly plead "Not guilty" to save their own skin rather than tell the whole truth and hope for jury nullification.
+How would Yudkowsky react, if someone said that? _My model_ of Sequences-era 2009!Yudkowsky would say, "This is an incredibly intellectually dishonest attempt to [sneak in connotations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yuKaWPRTxZoov4z8K/sneaking-in-connotations) by performing a categorization and trying to avoid the burden of having to justify it with an [appeal-to-arbitrariness conversation-halter](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters); go read ['A Human's Guide to Words.'](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb)"
-But political convenience comes at a dire cost to our common interest! There's a proverb you once failed to Google, which runs something like, "Once someone is known to be a liar, you might as well listen to the whistling of the wind."
+But I had no idea what 2019!Yudkowsky would say. If the moral of the "hill of meaning in defense of validity" thread had been that the word "lie" was reserved for _per se_ direct falsehoods, well, what direct falsehood was being asserted by Scott's detractors? I didn't think anyone is claiming that, say, Scott _identifies_ as alt-right (not even privately), any more than anyone is claiming that trans women have two X chromosomes.
-Similarly, once someone is known to vary the epistemic standards of their public statements for political convenience (even if their private, unshared thoughts continue to be consistently wise)—if they say categorizations can be lies when that happens to help their friends, but seemingly deny the possibility of categorizations being lies when that happens to make them look good ...
+Commenters on /r/SneerClub had been pretty explicit in [their](https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/atgejh/rssc_holds_a_funeral_for_the_defunct_culture_war/eh0xlgx/) [criticism](https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/atgejh/rssc_holds_a_funeral_for_the_defunct_culture_war/eh3jrth/) that the Culture War thread harbored racists (_&c._) and possibly that Scott himself was a secret racist, _with respect to_ a definition of racism that includeed the belief that there are genetically-mediated population differences in the distribution of socially-relevant traits and that this probably has decision-relevant consequences that should be discussable somewhere.
-Well, you're still somewhat better off listening to them than the whistling of the wind, because the wind in various possible worlds is presumably uncorrelated with most of the things you want to know about, whereas clever arguers who don't tell explicit lies are very constrained in how much they can mislead you. But it seems plausible that you might as well listen to any other arbitrary smart person with a blue check and 20K followers. I remain,
- * (The claim is not that "Pronouns aren't lies" and "Scott Alexander is not a racist" are similarly misinformative; it's about the _response_)
- * "the degree to which category boundaries are being made a conscious and deliberate focus of discussion": it's a problem when category boundaries are being made a conscious and deliberate focus of discussion as an isolated-demand-for-rigor because people can't get the conclusion they want on the merits; I only started focusing on the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-cognition part after the autogynephilia discussions kept getting derailed
- * I know you're very busy; I know your work's important—but it might be a useful exercise? Just for a minute, to think of what you would actually say if someone with social power _actually did this to you_ when you were trying to use language to reason about Something you had to Protect?
-]
+And this was just _correct_. For example, Alexander's ["The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/) favorably cites Cochran _et al._'s genetic theory of Ashkenazi achievement as "really compelling." Scott was almost certainly "guilty" of the category-membership that the speech against him was meant to convey—it's just that Sneer Club got to choose the category. The correct response to the existence of a machine-learning classifer that returns positive on both Scott Alexander and Richard Spencer is not that the classifier is "lying" (what would that even mean?), but that the classifier is not very useful for understanding Scott Alexander's effects on the world.
+Of course, Scott was great, and we should defend him from the bastards trying to ruin his reputation, and it's plausible that the most politically convenient way to do that was to pound the table and call them lying sociopaths rather than engaging with the substance of their claims, much as how someone being tried under an unjust law might dishonestly plead "Not guilty" to save their own skin rather than tell the whole truth and hope for jury nullification.
+But, I argued, political convenience came at a dire cost to [our common interest](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes). There was a proverb Yudkowsky [had once failed to Google](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K2c3dkKErsqFd28Dh/prices-or-bindings), which ran something like, "Once someone is known to be a liar, you might as well listen to the whistling of the wind."
+Similarly, once someone is known to [vary](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/) the epistemic standards of their public statements for political convenience—if they say categorizations can be lies when that happens to help their friends, but seemingly deny the possibility of categorizations being lies when that happens to make them look good politically ...
+Well, you're still _somewhat_ better off listening to them than the whistling of the wind, because the wind in various possible worlds is presumably uncorrelated with most of the things you want to know about, whereas [clever arguers](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kJiPnaQPiy4p9Eqki/what-evidence-filtered-evidence) who [don't tell explicit lies](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xdwbX9pFEr7Pomaxv/) are constrained in how much they can mislead you. But it seems plausible that you might as well listen to any other arbitrary smart person with a bluecheck and 20K followers. I know you're very busy; I know your work's important—but it might be a useful exercise, for Yudkowsky to think of what he would _actually say_ if someone with social power _actually did this to him_ when he was trying to use language to reason about Something he had to Protect?
+(Note, my claim here is _not_ that "Pronouns aren't lies" and "Scott Alexander is not a racist" are similarly misinformative. I'm saying that whether "You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning" makes sense _as a response to_ "X isn't a Y" shouldn't depend on the specific values of X and Y. Yudkowsky's behavior the other month made it look like he thought that "You're not standing in defense of truth if ..." _was_ a valid response when, say, X = "Caitlyn Jenner" and Y = "woman." I was saying that, whether or not it's a valid response, we should, as a matter of local validity, apply the _same_ standard when X = "Scott Alexander" and Y = "racist.")
-Without disclosing any _specific content_ from private conversations with Yudkowsky that may or may not have happened, I think I am allowed to say that our posse did not get the kind of engagement from Yudkowsky that we were hoping for. (That is, I'm Glomarizing over whether Yudkowsky just didn't reply, or whether he did reply and our posse was not satisfied with the response.)
+Anyway, without disclosing any _specific content_ from private conversations with Yudkowsky that may or may not have happened, I think I _am_ allowed to say that our posse did not get the kind of engagement from Yudkowsky that we were hoping for. (That is, I'm Glomarizing over whether Yudkowsky just didn't reply, or whether he did reply and our posse was not satisfied with the response.)
Michael said that it seemed important that, if we thought Yudkowsky wasn't interested, we should have common knowledge among ourselves that we consider him to be choosing to be a cult leader.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff